Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Following its successful run at SF MoMA the block-buster Garry Winogrand retrospective is now showing at The Met NYC. Until September 21st.The
first retrospective in twenty-five years of work by Garry Winogrand
(1928–1984)—the renowned photographer of New York City and of American
life from the 1950s through the early 1980s—this exhibition brings
together more than 175 of the artist's most iconic images, a trove of
unseen prints, and even Winogrand's famed series of photos made at the
Metropolitan Museum in 1969 when the Museum celebrated its centennial.
It offers a rigorous overview of Winogrand's complete working life and
reveals for the first time the full sweep of his career.Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in
Manhattan during the 1960s, and in both the content of his photographs
and his artistic style he became one of the principal voices of that
eruptive decade. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand,
who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee
Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite,
exposing some twenty thousand rolls of film in his short lifetime. He
photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous
actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos,
rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the
construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police.
Daily life in postwar America—rich with new possibility and yet equally
anxious, threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in
a continuous stream.While Winogrand is widely considered one of the greatest
photographers of the twentieth century, his overall body of work and
influence on the field remain incompletely explored. He was enormously
prolific but largely postponed the editing and printing of his work. The
act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making
prints or editing for books and exhibitions; he often allowed others to
perform these tasks for him. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left
behind proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never
printed, as well as approximately 6,600 rolls of film (some 250,000
images) that he had never seen, more than one-third of which he had
never developed at all; these rolls of film were developed after his
death.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz